No Help Desks

7.5 hours! It took 7.5 hours today for a so-called help desk to confirm the very first question I asked them!

Lets back up a little here...this morning one of our systems that talks to a vendor's product stopped working. After a quick play around with it, I figured the password for the account that our system uses must have expired. So I rang the vendor's help desk to ask for said expired password to be reset. Having done a lot of support related work in my current position I know the danger of making presumptions about the problem without at least informing the analyst at the other end of the full details of my problem. I walked him through the issue and explained why I felt it was an expired password. He then asked me to repeat everything I done to try and fix the issue already, he made me repeat it three times. Next he didn't believe me when I said it still wasn't working. His next step was to webex into my machine (remote in over a secure connection over the web) and try himself, another 3 times. Naturally, it still didn't work.

By now, the time spent had racked up to 1 hour and 20mins. He said he would check the password at his end and call me back. One hour later he called me back to say the password didn't look like it had expired so he was referring it on to 2nd line support. So far, we're 2.5 hours in.

It required two phone calls from the 2nd line analyst. One was to do exactly what I and his colleague had already tried. The second was do it again.

Four hours in....

He then called me back and conferenced in one the developers at his company. The developer listened and said it must be an expired password.

Five hours in and the password still hadn't been reset. "But it's not marked as expired at our end" was all the analyst could say to me.

I protested, no I begged, "Please just reset the password and let's try it!". But alas, he refused.

An additional two and half hours later, he called me back to say he has now reset the password and asked if I would try the new password he would give me......and what do you know.....it worked !

I suggested that he inform his colleagues that to avoid wasting an entire day, they should just reset the password in future as one of the first steps to avoid all the unnecessary waste, as I for one, certainly do not want to go through that again.

I truly believe there are support services out there who know what they are doing, how to help and more importantly listen to you. But what I find exceptionally frustrating are those help desks who try the same things over and over again, even though it clearly isn't working. I dub these, "No Help Desks".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's have a meeting

I am zapped. I am drained both emotionally and physically. I love a good meeting like the next person but spending half my working day in them has killed me. I've been having a good 4 -5 hours a day of meetings recently. I wish I could say they were all useful and worthwhile, but when we had the meeting to discuss the next series of 6 meetings come up, I nearly lost the will to live. But, I pushed on through. I kept reminding myself about the silver lining and that there IS a light. However, today I wanted to take a pair of very blunt scissors and hurt someone, badly, repeatedly, drawing a lot of blood and making them drink it and then stabbing them again. After completing the series of six 2-hour long meetings, I got invite to a "group discussion" so that we can understand what came out of the meetings. Seriously, wtf?! I thought it was only the public sector that wanted a meeting to discuss the meetings that was arranged in another meeting???
Read more

What Makes a good autobiography

“It was as I was stumbling home at 5am, alone, tired and very, very drunk that it dawned on just how funny licking the dirt off the floor in the bar, actually was. “ Was that any good? I doubt it. What was wrong with it? It offers nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that differs from most young people in the UK. There is nothing says to the reader, I, Richard Jacobs, have lived a different and varied life such that others really want to invest a month of the spare time reading about it. But what if that was written by a premiership footballer reminiscing about a team Christmas party? I bet that quote would be all over sky sports news like an alcoholic at a free bar. So what does make a good autobiography? What makes a page turning, can’t put down, can’t go to sleep yet, introspective tale of person’s life. For me, what makes people first pick up an autobiography, read it cover to cover and then retell the stories and insights they have learnt to their friends is that th...
Read more

Charity

In a little under one week, I, along with around 35,000 others, will be competing in the London Marathon. Since the first London Marathon in 1981, half a billion pounds has been raised for charity. This is a phenomenal amount, and proof, that when it comes down it, people can display extraordinary acts of kindness and generosity. Yet for a time I couldn't  help but wonder why it takes such a grueling and painful effort from the tens of thousands of people each year to generate such revenues for charity. I’d like to note at this point, that I have been blown away by the support of friends, colleagues & family when trying to raise the sponsorship needed for the marathon. You would always like to believe that the people around would give while you put yourself through the painful months of training but I have truly been in awe of the level of generosity that people have shown and how far they have dug into their pockets. The point, I was getting at though, was that it has taken so...
Read more